


Things You Said While We Were Driving

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, Casserole, Driving, F/M, Fluff, a little angsty mostly sad or wistful, prompted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 02:46:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7149542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on one of those ask-lists on Tumblr. Five things Cole hears in a car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things You Said While We Were Driving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ohgress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohgress/gifts).



1.  
It had been quiet a long time. Cassie used to explain things to him as she drove him back and forth through 2016, to all the places where she knew the way and he knew they had to be, and he liked the sound of her voice, calm and knowledgeable. But that was before he’d died and she’d gotten lost and he’d come back and found her different.

Now, they mostly drove in silence.

But he missed her voice. He wasn’t good at talking--never had been--but he wanted to get her talking, so he said “What’s this thing called?”, grabbing some widget out of the center console of her car as if he really cared.

She glanced over, named it some medical thing, then turned her eyes back to the road. But they didn’t stay there.

“What was it like? When the bomb hit?” she asked, her voice soft and tentative.

“I didn’t feel much of it,” he said, hedging, because how do you tell someone that it was an awful like that time when you were kids and the old gas tank blew up and almost killed you? “It was hot. Loud. Jones got me out of there before it did more than sort of scorch me a little. Landing was worse.”

“I thought you’d died. Talking to me.”

“I didn’t.”

 

2.  
Learning to drive wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be, and he picked it up pretty fast. He wasn’t really sure why he’d never learned before; in the future, where he couldn’t go now, they were mostly always on foot, and if they needed to drive, they didn’t usually have the rank or the power to be the drivers. That was for people like Deacon. For Whitley. For the guzzlers who trolled the roads in the early days when there were a lot of cars and lots of fresh gas around.

Cole and Ramse never had a car to worry about driving.

But now, in 2016, they had to have a car. Cassie had sort of said something like that before, that everyone drove everywhere, but he didn’t think about it until he wanted to get away from Ramse once in a while, to do things for himself.

He wished he could get away from Ramse now.

“You’ve got that look again.”

“What look?”

“That look that means you’re thinking about her.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

A pause, then, “Cole. She’s gone. She’s probably fine.”

“She’s probably dead. And it’s my fault,” he said, too harshly, before he could stop himself. Old habits. He’d never had to filter what he said to Ramse before they faced off in 1987. Ramse didn’t say anything, and Cole carefully loosened his fingers from the steering wheel.

“I hope she’s not,” Ramse said, and looked out the window.

 

3.  
Cole’s mind was going about seventy miles a minute. He had no idea what he was going to do next, but Ramse was gone, Cassie was gone, and he couldn’t just hang around an airfield pretending to belong there while the cargo of a private plane burned nearby.

“Thanks for the ride, friend,” Jennifer said, trying to sidle out of the way, “but I’ll just be on my--”

“Just get in the car.”

She was chattering, endlessly, and he couldn’t think, so he was trying to tune her out, when something got through.

“I didn’t mean what I said when I said it later.” Jennifer never made much sense, but he was sort of getting a feel for the patterns in her crazy, and that one felt significant, so he looked up to the rearview mirror and found her holding perfectly still for a minute. “I thought I meant-it-will-mean-it, but I didn’t. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

And then it was like a switch got flicked, and she was back to her manic rambling and he had to figure out what to do next.

 

4.  
Deacon was making him do the driving. They were headed out to gather supplies from places that used to be entirely devoid of them before the time-shift left more people around to keep things going, and Cole was having to do some mental rearrangement. It had always been his goal to change the timeline, but he’d never expected to still be here to have to re-learn where everything was when he did.

“Cassie’s a good woman,” Deacon said out of nowhere, and Cole only barely managed to keep from driving off the road at the spike in his heartrate that it caused.

“Yeah. And?”

“She deserves more than this.” The way he said *this* sounded like he meant more than just the world. It sounded like he meant both Cole and himself. “Something better.”

“Yeah.”

That was almost the most heart-to-heart they’d ever had. Must’ve been the whiskey he brought back.

 

5.  
Cassie hated going out in the apocalypse, and Cole usually didn’t make her. Last time, he’d seen her looking at the desolation that was his home as if it was her own personal failure, and it’d made his heart break, so he’d decided, without telling anyone, that he wasn’t going to make her do that again.

But she’d insisted, this time, had even insisted on driving, and for a second, it felt like old time, her in the driver’s seat, him slumped in the passenger side. This was just a simple run, wouldn’t take long, but he was happy just to get a moment alone with her.

She almost hadn’t survived her showdown with the Witness, and he’d been sure he’d lost her--again--but she’d come home calmer than he’d seen in ages. She even smiled a few times, without someone having to trick it out of her.

“I thought we had no future,” she said, without looking away from the road, and Cole’s heart sped up and his mind latched onto every word she said in case he was at risk of hearing it wrong. “The day of the time loop. I thought there couldn’t possibly be any way that we could--just be.”

There was a long pause, but she wasn’t waiting for him to answer, she was gathering something inside herself. Courage? Strength?

“I was wrong.”

She reached out without looking, and took his hand the way he’d taken hers that night, and she held on with a new force he’d never felt from her before, except maybe in 2017 when it was her last chance and she’d hugged him. It was hope, he realized. Hope that they could be together. 

He squeezed her hand back, and couldn’t stop the smile the spread across his face. He’d always been hers, and now she was his, of her own accord and by her own wish, and he wanted to scoop her up in her arms and close all the space between them. But she was driving and they had a job to do, and there would be time when they reached where they were going. Right now, it was good enough that she’d reached back, that he’d still been here when she did--he’d almost died, too, after all, but what else was new for him--that she was smiling too, and that they were, finally, on the same emotional ground.

He’d never been happier that Cassie was wrong about something in his life.


End file.
